Freethought Nation

It is my pleasure to join this forum. I have recently began intense study of the historicity of jesus and the origins of christianity, and i must say that i am fascinated by Acharya's work, along with earl doherty and richard carrier.

their scholarship is very compelling, and i am at a loss to explain how so many scholars are still able to maintain their beliefs about the bible despite the appeal of all sense and reason. at my age it should's surprise me, but it still does sometimes.


i am not a scholar, i am merely an attorney and mathematician who spent his youth trying to understand...well, everything. through the course of my reflections there seemed to me some very basic and terminal problems with the worldview espoused by orthodox christianity that are quite independent of physical evidence.

1. man is made in god's image. what does this mean if not for our rationality? i was taught from childhood that what sets us apart from angels was "nishama", or sentience. this was our gift. yet despite this gift the call of god is to use faith to know him. in fact, it is a sign of one's righteousness the more seemingly absurd one's beliefs, as that evinces stronger faith. the theme of the bible is that we are to forsake the gift that god has given us and embrace the thing that runs antithetical to it. since satan is antithetical to god, isn't this abstractly the same as the bible calling us to be like satan? it appears a perversity. this perversity is underscored when one recalls that in genesis the serpents tempts eve by telling her the fruit will make her like god. how ironic!

2. we are taught to take the historical accounts of the bible as literal, as factual and not poetic. take for instance the giving of the wandering through the desert and the ten commandments. here the jews (all 600,000 of them) wander in the desert being led by a giant cloud during the day and a pillar of fire during the night. this is of course after the parting of the red sea. suffice it to say that the knowledge of god should be common to every one of them. they had just been delivered from bondage with the use of supernatural signs. this cloud/fire takes them to mt sinai for moses to be given the law by god himself. is it reasonable to think that there were any jews who failed to appreciate this? were there any who didn't know this? at any rate, what are we to believe these myriad physical manifestations of god did for the faith of these jews? nothing. despite KNOWING god in a way we never could they still saw fit to get impatient with how long moses was taking and build a golden calf to worship at the very FOOT of the mountain were god was having his little pow wow. really? how are christians today supposed to be comforted in their faith if they are to believe that gods chosen people couldn't sustain their faith whilst at the foot of his presence? this stretches credibility beyond the point of absurdity! can anyone really say that there is a shred of plausibility to this fantastical account? what person would have the gall to raise an idol to a foreign god in the presence of the very god who just delivered you (albeit 40 years ago) by whipping the crap out of the most dominant force on the planet? frankly it's insulting to our intelligence. but that takes us to point 1 again, doesn't it.

3. the world of the bible has nothing in common with the modern world save for humans. god was everywhere in the bible. he spoke to people. he helped people. he punished people. he did requests. he smote people. the old testament was like having god on speed dial. he was always just a prayer away. the new testament featured god, but he was much more discrete. he talked to some people, but he didn't do it nearly as much. apart from his bff's in the stories he really didn't interact to the same extent. fast forward today, and where is god? does this world look anything like the world described in the bible, especially the old testament? hardly. the chief source of knowledge of god in the old testament was god himself. he would choose a prophet or judge, and it was pretty freaking obvious that the prophet was god's boy. today the chief source of knowledge is the church. what does god do all day now that he has retired? what plausible reason is there to explain why god just can't be bothered with us anymore? i read the bible and was saturated with the obviousness of its non-historical nature. the answer is obvious. god hasn't blessed me with faith. he instead has cursed me to be like him, and that makes me worthy of hell.


sorry for the rant. but listening to jp holding has built up much frustration, and it was good to get some of it out.

welcome aboard.

I know, I know, JP Holding and camp are beating their heads against a brick wall. The more you understand about the evolution of God, the more the OT begins to make sense where it doesn't make sense otherwise:

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

Ahriman, you make an important point here about Satan. The Bible calls Satan (or the devil) the father of lies (John 8:44). So if the church tells lies, then it is following Satan rather than God. One of Satan's main tricks (if you will forgive my anthropomorphising) is to pretend to be God, so that no one can criticise people who are behaving Satanically. This problem of where Satanism is present in the world is very complex, but can be analysed by looking at Biblical ideas such as where people take the broad and easy path that leads to destruction, and avoid the narrow and hard path that leads to life (salvation?), as Jesus put it at Matthew 7:13-14. These old parables can be recast and analysed against a materialist scientific understanding.

You also mention Moses and the Ten Commandments and the absurdity of the literal story. There is actually no evidence of an Exodus from Egypt, as explained in some detail by the great archaeologist Israel Finkelstein in The Bible Unearthed. From that link - "Egypt in the 15th century BC, the time of the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan as described in the Book of Joshua according to the Biblical chronology. As the map indicates, Canaan was occupied by Egypt at that time, a fact which the Bible fails to register." Anyone who supports the literal story is either deluded or a liar. A further important point here is that the well-known commandments of Exodus 20 are not actually called the Ten Commandments in the Bible. That title is reserved by the author of Exodus for a second set of commandments in Exodus 34, where priority is given to misogyny as the primary commandment. The real Ten Commandments (given that title at 34:28) start off as follows



Verse 13 explains that God's consort Asherah is summarily divorced. The former equality of men and women is abolished. God was married to Asherah when his name was El, a name that is still present in words such as Israel, Samuel, etc. But because power was to be centralised in the patriarchal theocracy, the first commandment was naturally to avoid ensnarement by anyone who promoted gender equality or female tradition. As God said, "Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles."

Acharya's work seeks to expose this enslaving and oppressive misogyny of the monotheist tradition. The trouble is, verses such as Exodus 34:13 were a great inspiration for European racism and the settlement of the USA and the whole western imperial enterprise. So the churches still have a lot of emotional investment in these ideas, in their efforts to provide moral legitimacy for the conquest of the world by Europe.

Thanks for the reception. The evolution of god video was extremely helpful and completely rescued the golden calf story from the abyss of nonsense that it is portrayed as today.




Here is something else that has bothered me for years, and seeing it is near Christmas it is even more worth mentioning. Lore has it a star heralded jesus' birth. That sounds really great and all...having that kind of celestial endorsement, but what does that really mean. Stars are always out there, so it seems like a textbook post hoc fallacy to think there was a connection...UNLESS, the star was a different star altogether. This, however, takes us to another problem. This star supposedly lead to his birthplace over Bethlehem. If this star were an actual star, the it is physically impossible for it to lead anywhere, as its distance would mean it never moves in the sky no matter how far it is followed. The wise men would have circled the globe and never made it...just like racing for the horizon. The other alternative is that this star was different. It moved in the sky as it was pursued. This would require the star to be extremely close to earth...far closer than the moon. The obvious consequence of this of course would mean massive gravitational catastrophe, but this is the baby j we are talking about, so god could have held all laws of physics in abeyance. Fine. Where things go bad is that I know of no secular records from that time of anyone else noticing this celestial intruder into our airspace. Astronomy was huge at that time, and such an extreme anomaly would have been thoroughly documented.

So we are left with the whole account being completely made up or that only three men in the entire world happened to look up during the weeks surrounding his birth.

Once again the orthodox position breaks plausibility.


In sum, I just can't understand how people can say there is such underlying truth when everything verifiable in the story ends up being rendered ridiculous and impossible. Faith is a great thing indeed.

Long story short, it's a take on an old astral motif about the procession of constellations leading into and out of the winter solstice:

viewtopic.php?p=22138

viewtopic.php?p=16312

Bethlehem meaing "house of bread" is likely a reference to the constellation Virgo which rises after Orion and Sirius and after which the sun will rise, born of the virgin dawn fresh and anew after the winter solstice. It's mythology, so we're talking about symbolism and allegory more so than concrete places in history. It's essentially a winter solstice myth written in such a way that from priest to priest it's understandable. Outside of the astronomer - priest fold it's more obscure.

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

i'm familiar with the astrotheological explanation of the story, and my point is that this explanation is the only one that has any merit at all. taking a historical reading is just untenable on several different grounds.





here is another observation: the morality play of the bible is redundant.

why did god create man? he made man to enjoy him and be glorified blah blah blah. ok. but god also made angels. so we have in a sense two different creations. one is the earthly creation filled with people, hippies, and country music fans, and the other is a spiritual creation filled with angels and heaven. why the need for two? angels appeared to come first. weren't they enough glory for god? why did he need to create more? does he have security issues? the classic answer is that god made man different than angels. the point of making the angels was for them to be the servants of god, whereas man was made with freewill thus giving rise to the morality scheme. so to review, man and angels don't perform the same roles for god's ego. god made angels to do stuff for him, and he made man to see if he would love him and be saved, thus showing his glory and grace for the elect and power in damning the reprobate. but here's where things get muddy for me. the angels are capable of the same sort of capriciousness as man...specifically, lucifer. he was an angel who decided he had had enough of following god. so in the heavenly creation we have roughly a third of the angels rebelling against god. these were sent into hell while the loyal stayed in heaven. how is this not essentially the same narrative as with the earthly creation? both objects showed freewill and the ability to decide whether to follow god or not. there is no impetus for a second creation then. god got his morality play with the angels. to do the same thing again with humans is just redundant and superfluous.

all in all this is just another case of how the metaphysic and story behind the bible just do not withstand abstract scrutiny.


and speaking of the devil, he is described as being very clever in his attempts to foil god. while no doubt the concept of satan as we understand it today was ripped off from zoroastrianism, christians would claim otherwise. so let's see what christians would have us believe. lucifer was the most prized of heaven's host. essentially he was the number two to god's dr. evil. at some point he rebelled and dedicated his life to ruining god's plan. not let's see how their story holds up to a quick reflection. what is it reasonable to conclude lucifer knows about god? i would be so bold as to venture that he knows that god is, well...god. since we as finite humans with our puny little minds know enough about god to know that one can't possibly think that he can be defeated or thwarted (would kind of go against his nature as being god) we must then conclude that lucifer failed to get that memo. so on the one hand lucifer is a brilliant deceiver, yet on the other hand he is so stupid as to think that he could frustrate god's plan and defeat him. the concept of satan as the adversary is absolutely absurd in a monotheistic worldview. for how can you have a believable antagonist when he is going up against the lord of all reality? he would be a fool, and god would never make such a fool his most high. it is only within a dualist framework of polytheism that a satan character can have any teeth at all. in monotheism, satan is more akin to just another servant of god, albeit the most loyal of all as his duty will see him damned forever. i daresay no christian would follow god if he knew that hell was to be his reward.

regardless of how i think about these concepts they always reduce to absurdity. and it just never stops.

Yes, true. That is an important insight that sets up a good framework to analyse Biblical metaphor.On your principle that astrotheology provides the only explanation, I don't see how you separate the earthly and the spiritual. One criterion of separation in classical times was the orbit of the moon, with the sublunary or earthly temporal realm seen as susceptible to change and corruption, while the superlunary or heavenly eternal realm is perfect. Angels were often identified with planets, for example Lucifer as the morning star Venus, while God was identified with the sun, as the stable unchanging source of light and life. In reality, the sun and planets are just as material as the earth.I know there is a note of mockery and derision in your questions here, but posing them presents an interesting question of method. Taking astrotheology as a methodological principle, we start by assuming the truth of the scientific consensus understanding of reality, in terms of matter ordered by physical law. As soon as we anthropomorphise matter by speaking of God and angels, we are in the realm of metaphor. It only can make sense to question God's motives if this questioning can be tied back to some real observable physical structure or cycle. Asking why God created humans is not an astrotheological question, because astrotheology understands myth as a human construction to explain natural events, not as a description of intentional entities.Angels are invented by humans as a way of explaining natural events. The task of myth is to explain reality as we experience it. The fall of Lucifer mirrors the fall of man in the heavenly realm. Lucifer has something of a demiurge quality, with an arrogance that thinks he can equal the power of the creator. But that would be like the earth imagining it is a star. It is just wrong, and involves replacement of observation and logic by fantasy - the central problem of the fall from grace.This presents an interesting religious analysis of atheism. If atheists say god does not exist, then the question of defeating or thwarting god does not arise. But if, following Spinoza and Einstein, we define god as reality or nature, then we can see god cannot be defeated.

And yet, a big problem of our modern technological economy is that humans imagine they can control nature. This human hubris appears a forlorn and futile idea, but one that can readily be pursued until it is broken by the power of nature.That appears to be a misunderstanding of the traditional Augustinian monotheism, which sees Satan as not representing a real cosmic principle, but more as a tumorous corrupt perversion of the truth, twisted in such a way as to appear plausible for a time but in reality primed for destruction.

So Satan, as the principle of error, has teeth within monotheism, since he has the potential to consign humanity to extinction if he is not stopped by God.
Very interesting speculation Ahriman, thanks for sharing. I don't agree with you that the concepts are absurd, since they make sense as mythic projections of the big archetypes of human existence.

the point of my observations are to show the shortcomings of the modern reading of the bible and it's metaphysics.

as far as satan goes, i stick by my statement that he is impotent in a monotheistic model. since god has all power and all happens according to his will, anything satan does is both willed and enabled by god. satan becomes thus a way to launder the evil off of god. christians insist on divorcing god from evil, so whenever god does anything "evil" the evil begins when satan does it. it's all sillyness because goodness and evilness are dualities, and it is impossible for god to be labeled as good without also being labeled as evil. in the end the devil is just a convenient tool to help christians cope with evil.


consider the following,

"there is a beautiful woman at work who is trying to get me to cheat on my wife."

response 1: "resist the attempts of the devil to ensnare your soul."
response 2: "have you considered the possibility that maybe god hates you and wants you to go to hell?"

Think of it this way. Time is like a river, flowing from past to future. But the river of time also has eddies and whirlpools in which the flow gets disrupted.

Satan is a bit like an eddy in the river of time, an area where things seem to be going backwards against the cosmic process. For anything caught in the eddy, it can seem it is going forward, and the big river is going backwards. But this can only be a temporary illusion, although one that can last for thousands of years.

If we anthropomorphise God to be like a human being, then we can think of Satan as like a deadly cancer - a natural part of our body but not a part that is in tune with the ultimate purpose of health.

Your point Ahriman is that Satan is part of God. Yes, like an eddy is part of a river, and a cancer is part of a body. But Satan is therefore the part of God that moves contrary to God's ultimate purpose. There is nothing impossible about that as a metaphor for reality.

Where people get confused is when they see Satan as a rival cosmic principle. This was the old Manichaean idea. I agree with the Christian idea that the world is basically good, but evil enters as a corruption of the good. This lines up with the idea of god as natural reality, and satan as those parts of reality that are destructive of the longer term good. But for this to work, you need a premise that human flourishing is good and blessed by god, while human failure is bad and cursed - understood in the long term large scale picture of evolution as the question of whether we will make it across the current apocalyptic hump of global crisis. So I think of Satan as the forces in the world that are pushing towards human extinction.

where we chiefly differ is in our use of certain words. i cannot apply words like "good" or "evil" outside of the context of human relativism. the universe is neither good nor evil. it simply is. an atom is a non-normative entity.

one can speak of natural law notions of goodness, but those are only attempts by man to concretize the concept.


ironically, new evidence has come to light that is enough to make me think more about this. paranormal science may be able to show a link between electromagnetic states, human neurophysiological states, and things that we classify as good or evil. but i suspect we are just putting familiar labels on things that have perfectly reasonable unknown explanations. but i digress.

as for your river analogy i cannot subscribe to it. if god were the source of all power, then satan is just like any other angel save for the fact that he gets the shit jobs. one can say that satan really longs for mankind's destruction, but since he has no power to do anything outside of god's will he represent's just another aspect of god, i.e. the aspect that likes to kill babies and send tsunamis.

personally, i do not think satan survives occam's razor. he is a polytheistic construct that we have tried our best to inject into monotheism in a meaningful way...and failed. we have failed in the same way that modern physics has destroyed the world of religion. relativity teaches us that all inertial reference frames are equivalent. this means that the perceived boundary between present and future is illusory. a consequent of this is that the future is not an unknown in the cosmological sense...only from our perspective. thus the whole model of god giving us a choice and waiting to see how we choose is rendered naive and wrong. we have no more choice over our futures than brad pitt does over whether or not to shoot john doe in se7en. it's in the script.

religion without choice is guilt. john calvin tried to intellectually rigorize christianity with his institutes, but he didn't recognize just how devastating predestination was to his paradigm. the whole garden of eden story is rendered quite stupid under the lens of predestination, and that's just the beginning.